By Kelvin 'Byg Datty' Wade
I’m convinced that my 7 year old dogs are Peagles, part pig and part Beagle.
How else to explain Theo’s ginormous appetite? Or the fact that he snorts like a pig when he’s foraging for food, a sound that even came as a surprise to our vet.
To be fair, Theo is on medication that happens to stimulate the appetite. In fact, he’s on two.
But his porcine eating habits were on display well before he was on the medication. I never worried about the medication stimulating his appetite because I genuinely didn’t believe it was possible for him to get any hungrier.
I stand corrected.
I’m just lucky they don’t have opposable thumbs or I’d have to padlock the fridge. I’d come home and Theo would have all four burners going on the stove cooking up everything in the house while Tyson would be seated at the table, knife and fork in his paws.
The Beagle Brothers’ favorite food is, without a doubt, pancakes. There’s something about those hot buttermilk discs that sends them into a frenzy. They’re like doggy catnip.
My dogs are carbaholics. I have no doubt that if I laid a big fat juicy ribeye and a stack of pancakes on the floor side by side that my dogs would be all over the pancakes and only eat the steak as an afterthought.
It’s gotten so bad that we can’t even use the word “pancake” in their presence. It’ll set them off. We have to say “flapjack.” But even now when we say flapjack, I can see Theo cocking his head to the side trying to figure it out. It’s only a matter of time before he adds it to his vocabulary.
If I’m eating pancakes, I have four eyes on me at all times. They carefully study the movement of my fork. They watch to see if I might accidentally drop a piece. They’re bodies are taut, ready to spring into pancake gulping action.
Sometimes with the crazed look in Theo’s eyes, I fear he’s employing some kind of doggie Jedi mind trick to will me to fork over the hotcakes.
I once made the mistake of leaving the dining room momentarily while half eaten pancakes rested on a plate on the table. I came back to a skewed tablecloth, a plate that had been licked clean and the butter missing as well. Who knew they liked butter with their griddlecakes?
I angrily stalked them and found them hiding behind my chair in the living room, Tyson laying on his back submitting and Theo lying flat trying to bury his face in his paws. They crawled around on their bellies, doing their best to nonverbally apologize for the pancake raid. They have what my mom used to call, ‘the can’t-help-its.’
I’m not going to lie. I thought of punishments that would’ve made PETA cringe. I wished I had access to Wile E. Coyote’s ACME catalog to order an anvil or two to drop on their heads or maybe a portable hole to drop on the floor and nudge them into.
But despite their breakfast pilfering and the other things they do that give me gray hairs, I love them. What am I going to do?
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